Globalization and Production Essay

This discussion will weave together the details supporting the claim that globalization has been detrimental in at least four distinct ways to the global community. In particular, the interests of reducing production costs for multinational corporate entities by operating in the developing sphere has driven a pointed ambition to undermine both labor rights and environmental protections in developing nations. In addition to these two concrete and immediate effects of globalization, there are also negative effects on the economies from which such corporations originate. Such aggressive free trade pursuant nations as the United States have seen a wholesale transplanting of production and service positions, bearing a retractionary impact on the domestic and local economies. A fourth impact of globalization in its current form is the spread of cultural hegemony, with nations such as the above-noted United States exporting its cultural conceits of consumerism and capitalist democracy in the interests of disseminating its way of life. This has had negative effectives both on the cultural preservation and autonomy of domestic populations but has also helped to stimulate widespread resentment, resistance and even outright aggression against the forces of globalization an its leading advocates. These four factors as those which have most accelerated the tangible impact of free trade and production across the last two decades. The discussion here engages an array of scholastic sources in reinforcing these grievances, with the ultimate outcome being a set of recommendations for how to evade these issues. In a pair of articles from Harley Shaiken and a text by Jagdish Bhagwati, we are presented with a nuanced range of perspectives on the globalization debate. With the opening of free trade paths between the developed and developing world, our global economic alignment is coming to reflect a divided pursuit of collective advancement which bears a byproduct of considerable detriment to a wide range of parties. Still, in both, we are offered suggested means through which to improve the path of globalization. Shaiken takes as a clear point of view in each of his essays an endorsement of labor unions as a means through which to advance worker skills and competitive, equitable employment wages. In an account from 2000 entitled â€Å"Experience and the collective nature of skill,’ he draws the conclusion that the diminished emphasis on the acquisition of labor skills that are informed by the socio-cultural context of their intended product market is reducing the performance and production quality yielded by workers. This is especially true of manufacturing sites where advanced technological processes are utilized, with global outsourcing far removing workers from the site of the new technology’s evolution. This necessitates a change in the labor specialization within the American economy, with the reorganization of our production serving to combat a â€Å"fierce world-wide competition for jobs [which] threatens to undercut wages and working conditions. † (Shaiken, 2004; 1) We have been ill-informed on the realities of globalization though, preventing any proper channeling of its interests. Of the premises which string together the articles in question, the most compelling and forthright representation of globalization may well be captured in the words of progressive stock speculator and philanthropist George Soros, who observed that â€Å"the salient features of globalization is that it allows the financial capital to move around freely, by contrast, the movement of the people remains heavily regulation. † (Shaiken, 2004; 3) This is particularly true of socioeconomic mobility, which is evidently supplanted in a globalizing market by the extension of wealth for the economically elite and a simultaneous widening of the gap between rich and poor. Such a resolution points to a fundamental aspect of contention in the discussion of globalization, which these articles ultimately converge to characterize as a duplicitous form of corporate imperialism that is conducive of exploitation, violence and cultural genocide rather than of a collective advancement in the standards of living and governance. In spite of this, we are given cause to believe there may yet be a suitable implementation of globalization. â€Å"The pace at which globalization advances social agendas need not be accepted as satisfactory. † (Bhagwati, 33) We may hold Shaiken’s decidedly critical stance on globalization up to the light of such a sentiment, and in doing so, we may find that in fact his is a rather positive approach to the subject matter. A prevalent theme in Jagdish Bhagwati’s â€Å"In Defense of Globalization† is that the execution of globalization has been its biggest shortcoming. With the proper accommodation of labor changes in the United States, these works come together to indicate that there is no way to reverse the opening of free markets. We must learn to adapt to its varied consequences. In his 2005 book, â€Å"Three Billion New Capitalists,† Clyde Prestowitz offers a scathing analysis of globalization, especially as it has been executed by the United States. He remarks upon its interest in expanding its markets to the global community as contradicting its current stature as the dominant force in the world economy. By shifting much of its production overseas, the United States helped to provide a path for the corporate entity to undertake a more cost-effective operation, not effected by labor costs, labor protections and environmental standards present in the United States. Even as this serves to improve profit margins, it also began to produce a trend of declining job availability which, with a growing proliferation of technological and scientific capabilities in a global setting has produced a similar decline in the value of the American programming, technology or communications specialist. This is a single element of a vicious cycle in which rising education costs are no longer congruent with available job opportunities or pay scales. This, in turn, is reducing the value and, consequently the quality of America’s educational institutions. Prestowitz laments this in compliment to his concern over America’s unwillingness to invest in new technologies and scientific endeavors. Author Jagdish Bhagwati offers some insight into this conversation with his book, â€Å"In Defense of Globalization,† where he determines that the corruption of such institutions as the World Trade Organization has contributed to a general incapacity for the proper execution of free trade. Indeed, the pressure committed by the United States to direct the WTO towards adoption of its interests is backfiring, with its failure to protect its own jobs, markets and investments resulting in an America trading at an incredible deficit to the rest of the world. Ultimately, Prestowitz has composed a text dedicated to articulating the ways in which this condition has resulted from globalization and providing fair warning of the eventual consequences which will arise there from if the United States does not make the appropriate changes to its policy approach. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States almost immediately began to pursue an approach of free trade proliferation which could extend its capitalist values throughout the developed and developing world. It was seen as an opportunity to be seized, with a vacuum of power in so many theatres inducing a need for some economic and socio-political direction. However, almost two decades hence, it must be conceded that the United States has executed an approach to globalization that is at once alienating to poor people throughout the developing world and to its own laborers. Globalization, it becomes apparent in Clyde Prestowitz’s 2005 text, â€Å"Three Billion New Capitalists: The Great Shift of Wealth and Power to the East,† has become a path to American corporate dominance and has yet produced a trend of apparent U. S. economic decline.